Entertainment At The Movies , n't get to first base with girls. "His thing is all about his insecuri- ty," Herz confides. At his age, I also used to get very nervous and tense up and withdraw around girls." Even today, he quips, "I don't do 'good date.' And the only other dates I can find are the women who don't do 'good date.' So we butt heads, and it's just futile." In the sequel — which takes place the summer after the charac- ters go off to college — we offi- cially learn that Jim, like Herz, is Jewish. His last name, Levenstein, is revealed just after a humiliating sequence involving Superglue and a sensitive body part. "In my mind, Jim, like me, is a guy who had a bar mitzvah but protested going to Sunday school," says Herz, who identifies more with the cultural aspects of Judaism. He was one of only a few Jewish kids at his high school in East Grand Rapids, Mich., but that didn't stop him from being elected president of his class. He says his classmates were too ignorant to be anti-Semitic. "It was like, 'So, you're Jewish. Have you gotten your Christmas tree yet?'" Herz recalls. One of his primary goals in high school was drinking and partying. His term paper of choice at the University of Michigan: dissecting teen flicks such as Porky's. A few months after graduation in 1996, Herz was working as a production assistant in Los Angeles Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Jim (Jason Biggs), Stiffer (Seann William Scott) and Us (Chris Klein) return to their western Michigan hometown after- their first year at college and rent a beach house for the summer in `American .Pie 2." Another Slice Of 'Pie' Michigan native Adam Herz talks about the sequel to his ulockbuster teen comedy. NAOMI PFEFFERMAN Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles t one point on the set of American Pie, actor Jason Biggs took screenwriter Adam Herz aside. "Dune, did you do it?" he whispered. "Did you really hump a pie?" It's the question everyone has asked Herz since Biggs' infamous pastry scene made pop culture his- tory and Pie became a sleeper hit in 1999, grossing about $240 million worldwide. So Herz, 28, sets the record straight just before today's release of American Pie 2. He never got fresh with baked goods. He didn't make a pact with his high school buddies to lose his virginity before grad- uation. His dad didn't try to educate him about sex with a copy of jugs magazine. "It's just that I always wanted to bring back the kind of teen movie where parrying and sex were of the utmost importance," the cocky, wickedly funny writer said -n an interview. "But I wanted the char- acters to be like real, actual kids who acted like I did when I was a teenager. So I just wrote the way we talked and the types of people that I knew." It's yet another example of how Hollywood takes one Jew's experience and transforms it into a pop cul- ture phenomenon. Before Herz's Jim, there was Seinfeld's "Jerry," whose Jewish neuroses provided the biggest laughs on TV in the 80s and '90s. Billy Crystal and his cronies lived out their Jewish child- hood fantasies on the range in City Slickers (1991) and City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold (1994). The NBC hit Will 6.- Grace, created by David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, is based on the gay Mutchnick's friendship with a straight Jewish woman. Seinfeld co-creator Larry David essentially plays himself — an acerbic curmudgeon — in HBO's darkly comic Curb Your Enthusiasm. Now comes another slice of Pie, which will again turn a geeky Jewish kid and his friends into the sum- A 8/10 2001 70 mer's uncontested teenage heroes. The character of Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) is reminiscent of the brainy kids who squeamishly avoided the bathroom at Herz's school. Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) is like the doofus who repeated her band camp stories ad nauseam in Herz's physics class. Jim (Biggs) is the likeable shlimazel who could- Funny, He Looks Jewish Actor Jason Biggs is often mistaken for a "member of the tribe. E veryone thinks I'm Jewish," says actor Jason Biggs. The 23-year-old star of American Pie, Loser and American Pie 2 is actually an Italian-Catholic from New Jersey. But he looks like the kind of nice Jewish boy you had a crush on in Hebrew school. Which is why he keeps getting cast as Jews, he says. His big break, at age 13, was playing Judd Hirsch's son in the Broadway run of Conversations With My Father. In 1997, TV mogul Steven Bochco cast him as Robby Rosenfeld in the series Total Security. In American Pie 2, Biggs' character, Jim, gets a Jewish surname, Levenstein. "Yet again, I am playing a Jew," quips the exuberant, per- sonable actor. If the misconception lingers, it doesn't help that Biggs has a Jewish girlfriend — a 24-year- old writer — his first serious relationship since high school. In the year-and-a-half they've been dating, he's celebrated Shabbat and Rosh Hashanah at her par- ents' Los Angeles home. When she flew off to Israel in Hours after he flew into Lod airport, Biggs was walking in Tel Aviv when he heard a loud explosion. "When we got to our restau- rant, all the Israelis were on their cell phones and suddenly they In 'American Pie 2," Jason Biggs reprises his role as Jim Levenstein, shown here with his movie dad, played by Eugene Levy. In real-life, the actor recent!) , returned from a trip to Israel with his Jewish girlfriend. June to visit her brother, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem exchange student, Biggs tagged along. "I was definitely concerned about the political situation," he confides, "but I've always wanted to see Israel." were clearing out of the place," he recalls. "Then our waiter told us there had been a suicide bombing at a discotheque less than half a mile away. It was as if the head- lines had come to life. When the shaken actor walked "